A desktop computer in suspend will draw very little juice, allowing the UPS it's on to be unplugged from the wall. Even if your computer is not on a UPS, does availability of updates block hibernation?

Windows Professional didn't start to include BitLocker until Windows 8. You need Windows 7 Ultimate for that, and that was withdrawn from inclusion with PCs along with Windows 7 Home Premium. Is Anytime Upgrade from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate still in operation?

And sometimes you get law enforcement officers who appear to have forgotten the rules of the road. Today I was in the right half of the through lane of a city street without a bike lane, with a right-turn-only lane (we drive on the right in the United States) to my right. A cop in a cop car pulled up beside me at a red light and told me I shouldn't be on the road because I'm blocking traffic. When I asked for clarification, he told me I ought to be farther to the right or on the sidewalk, and then he drove off. As far as I can tell, the first is illegal because the lane to the right is a turn-only lane, and the second is dangerous because it might cause me to plow into a pedestrian. Was this an attempted entrapment or just what the French call les incompetents?

Legitimate businesses can get a lot more failures to conduct business, since customers would not always have the card ID ready at hand.

That can be handled with an awareness campaign analogous to the We Card program, building an expectation among citizens that if you're going to subscribe to porn, you're going to need to have handy a means of age verification.

just asking the question above does not create a bunch of opportunity for credit card fraud.

But it does create a bunch of opportunity for the government to shut down your business on grounds of not taking legally sufficient precautions against underage access. It's a balancing act of liability for credit card fraud vs. liability for fines for noncompliance.

How does lack of BIOS "force" you to use Windows 8.1? The last time I tried Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, it supported UEFI just fine. And all the desktop applications I use either have a port, have an alternative, or work in Wine.